Chapter 2 #2
He yanked away from her ministrations and made a sound that seemed part growl. “I could give a fuck how I look, Bren.”
“No? Well, I do. I’d rather not look at your scarred-up face and know I could have fixed it, so stop resisting.”
My gaze trailed over his ravaged body, and I felt slightly queasy, thinking of Fell and how he must have suffered, thinking what those other dragons must have done to him if this was what they’d done to Vetr.
“Hey,” came the gruff voice.
My eyes snapped to his face. His eyes had calmed, the pupils rounding back to something more human as he studied me. “He didn’t suffer.”
He said it almost kindly and with such earnestness, clearly willing me to accept this as truth.
I inhaled raggedly, not certain that I believed him. If Fell had, in fact, suffered, would he tell me the truth? Would he want me to know the ugly reality?
I rubbed my fingertips against the popping and pulsing flesh of my palm like it was Fell I touched and comforted.
It was an action Vetr did not miss. “Even in death,” he went on, “the echo of a lost mate can … linger.” He spoke haltingly through grimaces and hissed breaths as Brenna moved on to the cuts and abrasions scattering his broad chest, wiping them clean with a damp cloth, then wringing the linen out in a bowl until the water ran purple with blood.
Mate.
Fell had been my mate?
That traveled around in my thoughts, settling and sinking deep. It was a faltering, startling realization. A fact that had never been a fact to me until that moment.
It had never occurred to me when we were together. There were so very many things that had not occurred to me then.
Fell, my mate.
That felt so much bigger, so much more significant than being husband and wife.
Our union had always felt a bit of a farce—an arranged marriage forced on us both. Born of deception and lies.
But mates?
Yes. That rang true. With him burning in my palm, the certainty of it penetrated my awareness. Too little too late.
I stared down at the slashing lines of the X on my palm that sparked and pulsed. “Are you sure?” I whispered, my voice so small, tremulous as the most brittle of leaves.
I wanted Vetr to be wrong. Hope was like that. Cruel and kind. Feeding you lies so you could cling to a semblance of peace. It was like a person dying of thirst, guzzling seawater, achieving momentary relief but actually only hastening death in the end.
“You saw them … you saw these other dragons”—I struggled to say the word—“kill Fell?”
We didn’t have a body, after all. Vetr was lucky to have made it back with his life. Perhaps Fell was still out there somewhere, broken but not dead.
I entertained all manner of possible scenarios as I stood in his den, hope clawing and fighting for life in my heart. Perhaps those other dragons still held him captive. Not a great prospect, but better than dead.
“I did. Yes.” His ice-gray eyes were all pity and remorse, sweeping over me and leaving me bare, skinless, all bones and hollowness. A ghost myself then.
“Miracle you made it back,” Brenna muttered with a woeful shake of her head as she tended to him, pushing a lock of errant hair from her dark brow.
“It was not without cost.” He adjusted slightly and pain washed over his face again.
It was gradually that I realized his words, those words, caused a shift in the air. A palpable stir in the press of bodies.
“What cost?” someone asked.
I bit back the hot reply that rose on my tongue. Fell. Fell was the cost, but he did not mean Fell, and they all knew it.
“I gave them the minn to the west of the Great Falls.” Vetr’s announcement struck like lightning into our midst. Everyone stilled.
Brenna cleared her throat after some moments. “That minn has the greatest reserve of jewels in all of the Crags. Why would you—”
“For peace,” he bit out. “I negotiated a truce, so that we might stop fighting our own kind, so that they would stop raiding into the south and putting us all at risk.” He gave a rattling sigh. “And for my life.”
Everyone started talking all at once.
A truce with them?
The skelm cannot be trusted!
That was our prize minn!
Kaldr is vicious! A monster! We cannot expect peace from him!
Pain corded Vetr’s throat, or he might have spoken, might have explained or defended what he had done. As it was, Brenna’s voice lifted above the din.
“Enough! Vetr is our alpha. We would have nothing if not for him. He brought us all together. He’s the heart of this pride, and I will follow him.
” Her green eyes glinted like sunlit moss, flitting to each and every face with challenge until they looked away.
“If he negotiated a truce with Kaldr so that he could return to us, then so be it.”
Expressions eased. Eyes softened. Heads nodded. Voices relaxed into rumbles of agreement that swept through the room.
I glanced around in confusion, not at all comforted by any of this.
So they had their alpha. And a truce with their enemy. It only cost them some jewel-laden minn. What about Fell?
I was not good with any of this.
The insides of my ears felt thick, my hearing muffled, the words of everyone around me less distinct as their faces grew distorted, features blurring. Unlike everyone else, I could feel no relief, no sense of peace.
“I’m sorry. I could not save him,” Vetr whispered, catching my gaze, seeing me, seeing my pain even as he suffered his own. With a glance to my fisted hand, he added, “He’s gone. What you’re feeling is just an echo of the bond.”
“An echo.” I frowned, digesting that, one of many lessons of dragonkind that I would learn.
I’d felt only an echo of Fell then. And now.
Still now.
It was his ghost alive in me. It wasn’t really him. It wasn’t really … real.
I’d struggled to accept that disappointing truth.
As the days slid into weeks, into months, into a year, the slim thread of hope I clung to that Vetr was mistaken thinned and frayed until it dissolved altogether.
Fell could not be alive all this time later. I knew that now.
I submerged a cloth into the basin of water on my washstand and then gingerly wiped it down the side of my face, studying myself in the looking glass hanging above the bowl, considering the girl I hardly recognized now.
Not even a girl. A woman. A woman I didn’t know anymore.
I winced. And that was not right either. Not a girl. Not a woman. Not human.
My gaze flicked to the damage Nayden had wrought upon me, inspecting the charred flesh dispassionately.
Fire was less dangerous to me than it was to others—dragon or human.
Enough fire could still destroy me, but as a fire-breather I possessed a higher tolerance.
It would take more than a mere brush with fire to wound me.
It would take prolonged exposure to come close to ending me.
Angling my face, I could see that the skin was already healing, was less charred. Only slightly pink now, fresh as a newborn’s, the healthy waxy pink closely resembling my natural skin. Natural? I winced. My human skin tone, then. I supposed that was what I meant.
I was no longer certain what could be considered natural in this world, and normal was not a word I liked to think about at all. It felt … wrong. Words like normal and natural only restricted, encouraging insecurities and self-loathing.
I went ahead and stripped off my shoes and dirty clothes until I stood in my shift.
Then I cleaned the rest of myself: neck, arms, chest, legs …
wiping away the day’s grime the best I could.
If a full bath was desired, there was a hot spring nearby.
You couldn’t be guaranteed privacy there, but it was soothing after a hard day spent training.
My gaze skimmed the jewel-studded wall as I idly held the cool cloth to my throat. The pattern of gems was etched upon my memory by now, but that did not stop me from scanning each and every bright stone, looking futilely for a black opal like the one Fell had worn around his neck.
Ever since I’d arrived here, I’d searched for a glimpse of one within the surfeit on display within the pride, and not just here in my den, but everywhere—at least in the common areas.
There were private dens, of course, where the others slept, but no one invited me into their sanctuaries.
Even a year later, I was not close enough to anyone for that.
I knew the necklace was gone, lost with Fell, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to see one like it again—just to remember, to be reminded of it. The black opal had been special. Half the size of my palm and deep black, threaded with red and green and blue.
I finished washing up and then patted myself dry with a towel in the glow of the gemstones.
It was outrageous to think how many humans would kill for even one of them.
How many of them in fact had. Just one of these rubies or emeralds or diamonds or sapphires would be motivation enough to slit a throat.
During the Threshing—and even after—whole troops of soldiers had entered the Crags to claim what they could of the dragon hoard.
As a human, I had never considered that dragons amassed treasure for any reason other than greed.
That was the belief perpetuated by humans.
That was what history chronicled. That was what I had been taught.
Never had it occurred to humans, to me, that the reason, the truth, could be something so fundamental, so very necessary, as that dragons needed gems to live.
That they mined for the precious stones deep in the mountains in order to sustain themselves.
As vital as air. Water for the parched. Food for the starved. Blood for the body.
I understood it now because I felt the same bone-deep need, too, ever since I’d turned during the crossing and woken up to what I was.
My fingers reached for the necklace at my throat. The raspberryred jewels on the heavy chain that Fell had given me in the Borg … to make up for the necklace I’d lost to bandits.
The stones whispered against my skin, seeping into me, fusing with my flesh, burrowing into my bones, feeding my soul, and I didn’t know if it was simply because they were jewels and I was me and that was what happened with dragons.
Or was it something more? Something deeper, something more exceptional because they came from Fell?
My gaze returned to my reflection, admiring the gems at my throat, appreciating their warmth, reveling in the pulse of energy they emitted, when the fur covering the threshold of my den flipped open.
Without preamble, Vetr strode inside.
No announcement. No calling out for permission.
I gasped and spun around, dropping my hands from the necklace humming against my clavicle as though caught doing something I was not supposed to do.
Leather or pelt curtains were what amounted to doors around here, and yet I’d never felt vulnerable before. I’d always had my privacy. No one had intruded into my space before.
Until now.